Safety, Classmate Image and Questions I Won’t Be Answering

Blog Date:

Tuesday, January 8, 2013 - 15:08

Safety

Safety is an integral part of our culture at FIRST. We’re working hard to put the finishing touches on the 2013 Safety Manual. Not much is changing from the 2012 Safety Manual, so that document is still a great guide to staying safe. We’ll be announcing the availability of the new Safety Manual soon, along with the winner of the Safety Animation competition. Stay tuned!

Classmate Image

We are aware of the current error teams are seeing when trying to download the Classmate Images from the Intel site. We are working with Intel to resolve the issue and will Blog again when it is available. As a reminder, only Rookie teams are required to image their Classmates for 2013, and USB Keys were included in the Rookie Kit of Parts to allow them to do so without having to download the image.

In the meantime, please do not rehost the images as this would violate FIRST’s End User License Agreement with Microsoft.

Thank you for your patience!

Questions I Won’t Be Answering

It’s great that the FRC Blog has become a lively discussion area for teams. Although we can’t respond to them all, Rose, one of our FRC Program Coordinators, and I see every comment that is made. I really enjoy responding personally when I am able to and it makes sense – it makes me feel more directly connected to our teams.

However, there is a class of questions I won’t be answering in this blog – and those are rules questions. It would not be fair for me to do so. Not all FRC teams read this blog, and this blog is not an official rules source. The FRC Manual is the source of the rules. If you have a question about rules, first, I strongly suggest you carefully read the entire manual. Many questions we get are already answered there, and the answers are not always in the section you think they might be. If you still have a question, you should post it to the official FRC Q&A system here: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/qanda. The Q&A system opens Wednesday, January 9th. Why does it not open immediately after kickoff? Because we want teams to spend some time familiarizing themselves with the manual first.

To be clear – I’m very happy for you to make comments ‘about’ the rules on the blog, but for answers to specific rules questions, the FRC Q&A is the place to go.

Comments

I don't know if you saw it since I mentioned @FIRSTtweets, but I mentioned to the Professional Disc Golf Association, on Twitter, that Ultimate Ascent is a Disc Golf-inspired game and included a link to the game animation. They responded "This is nuts! How can we help? Send me an email. social@pdga.com" Now, I have already contacted the local KC area Disc Golf club and they have asked everyone to look for their local team, contact them and help out. I wasn't sure if you thought this is what PDGA should do or if you wanted them to do something different nationally.

Hi Frank. The year in Atlanta where a late competition season decision was made to start qualifying on Thursday afternoon and inspections on Wednesday night, the changes to the schedule were communicated in the FRC director blog and emails but the official game manual tournament section was never changed. Since we were always told the manual was gospel, I asked the GDC in Q&A that year to clarify what the hierachy was as far as conflicting information from multiple sources. They said the latest official communication of any type from FIRST (email, blog, etc) takes precedence. Still true?

Hi Gary. My intent is to not publish something in the blog that is not consistent with the manual as I understand it at the time. I'm sure I'll hear about it if I do - and that's OK! If the change to qual rounds in Atlanta several years ago contradicted something in the manual, we should have updated the manual. It's important to recognize, though, that sometimes we need to make immediate decisions that apply to very specific extant circumstances. The manual can't cover every possible circumstance, though we try hard to cover everything we can think of, especially when it comes to game play.